by Philip Eade
Evelyn and Laura sailed for New York on 25 January 1947 shortly after an unsuccessful operation for piles which put him in a foul mood on arrival, when he was soon inveighing against the ‘tasteless’ food at the Waldorf Astoria, wine ruined by ‘bad cellarage’ and electric shocks every time he touched something metal. He objected to the talkative taxi drivers (‘It’s an outrage to be charged for such boredom’)59, the chewing of gum and the habit of smoking between courses. As for New York’s famous tall buildings, he wrote to Diana Cooper: ‘They are nothing nothing nothing at their best. At their worst, that is to say when they attempt any kind of ornament they are actively wicked. Compare them with the kind of things you have at your doorstep – Horse Guards Parade, Banqueting House, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster Abbey – or what I have within a five mile radius of Stinkers. Think of the infinity of aesthetic problems which a real architect has to solve every yard – and then of these great booby boxes. Interiors all vile.’60
At least Laura appeared to be enjoying herself and she managed to get through $2,000 ‘in a very few minutes’ when let loose in an expensive dress shop. After four days they continued their journey aboard the sumptuous 20th-Century train to Chicago, then onwards to Pasadena, where they arrived on the morning of 6 February to be met by a car from MGM to take them to the Bel Air Hotel. Alec Waugh later described what he had heard of Evelyn’s arrival in California: ‘The sun was shining, tropical flowers were in bloom, all the young people were dressed in shorts and slacks and open shirts and there was Evelyn in a stiff white collar and a bowler hat, carrying a rolled umbrella.’61 As Harold Acton, who also happened to be in Los Angeles at the time, observed, adaptability was not among Evelyn’s traits.
The next day Evelyn went to the vast MGM studios in Culver City, where he was less than elated to learn that their proposed screenwriter was Keith Winter, whom Evelyn ‘last knew as Willie Maugham’s catamite at Villefranche’ as he ominously noted in his diary.62 On that occasion in 1931 the twenty-four-year-old Winter had been staying at the same hotel as the two Waugh brothers and when Somerset Maugham asked the three young men to dine, Winter ended up spending the night and returned the next day looking very pleased with himself. ‘Willie told him how well he used his fingers,’ Alec Waugh recalled, ‘which made me think of Strickland in the Moon and Sixpence, who often despised the people he was enjoying.’63 Evelyn had taken a strong dislike to Winter then, refusing to speak to him except through the intermediary of Patrick Balfour, and he appeared to like him no better this time around. ‘He wore local costume,’ Evelyn disdainfully recorded, ‘a kind of loose woollen blazer, matelot’s vest, buckled shoes. He has been in Hollywood for years and sees Brideshead purely as a love story.’
As none of the Americans showed much interest in the book’s theological implications the discussions they had over its filming were, as far as Evelyn was concerned, ‘futile’,64 although he found ‘something a little luxurious in talking in great detail about every implication of a book which the others are paid to know thoroughly’.65 There was plenty too that was luxurious about MGM’s hospitality, which even Evelyn conceded was ‘consistently munificent’, so he felt ‘well content and, as soon as the danger of the film was disposed of, almost serene also’. Laura, meanwhile, ‘grew smarter and younger and more popular daily and was serenely happy’.66
Besides Harold Acton, who was visiting his American bachelor uncle and benefactor and chanced to meet Evelyn at the Huntington Museum, they also saw Randolph Churchill, who was in the midst of a hectic lecture tour: ‘I thought he could never shock me any more but he did,’ Evelyn wrote to Peters. ‘Brutishly drunk all the time, soliciting respectable women at luncheon parties etc. His lecture, to which we went at Pasadena, was surprisingly good considering the grave condition he was in.’67
By March Evelyn was able to tell Peters they were having a surprisingly agreeable time and, contrary to expectations, had been enjoying a ‘gay & refined’68 social life, having befriended Merle Oberon, visited Walt Disney’s studios and been taken to supper with Charlie Chaplin by Iris Tree. ‘I was thus able to pay my homage to the two artists [Disney and Chaplin] of the place,’ Evelyn noted in his diary.69
They also saw a lot of the English portrait painter Simon Elwes, an old friend who was visiting Los Angeles with his wife Golly (Peter Rodd’s sister). The Elweses’ hostess Andrea Cowdin had the Waughs to lunch or dinner every day, took them with her to parties and introduced them to ‘all the most agreeable people at her house’, Evelyn recorded.70 Another member of the English colony, Sir Charles Mendl (married to the decorator Elsie de Wolfe) took them to tea with Anna May Wong and lunch with Aldous Huxley, the latter possibly an awkward encounter given that a decade earlier Evelyn had torn into Huxley’s novel Eyeless in Gaza in a review in The Tablet.71 But they would at least have been able to discuss their shared fascination with Forest Lawn Memorial Park, a cemetery in Glendale that Evelyn had recently discovered and quickly recognised as ‘a deep mine of literary gold’.72
‘I am entirely obsessed with Forest Lawns,’ Evelyn wrote to Peters, ‘I go there two or three times a week, am on easy terms with the chief embalmer & next week am to lunch with DR HUBERT EATON [the founder] himself. It is an entirely unique place – the only thing in California that is not a copy of something else. It is wonderful literary raw material. Aldous flirted with it in After Many A Summer but only with the superficialities. I am at the heart of it. It will be a very good story.’73
After numerous visits to this extraordinary 300-acre site Evelyn claimed to have become ‘something very like friends’ with the embalmer, Mr Howells, ‘who gives the “personality smile” to the embalmed corpse’,74 each of which was euphemistically referred to at Forest Lawn as ‘the loved one’. Evelyn’s rapport with the original of Mr Joyboy at Whispering Glades was such that he had ‘seen dozens of loved ones half painted before the bereaved family saw them’.75 With its sentimental sugaring-over of the reality of death, Forest Lawn was for Evelyn the perfect embodiment of the meaningless paganism and general fakery at the heart of the American dream. And while the $140,000 Brideshead film deal never materialised, like Dennis Barlow at the end of The Loved One he returned from Hollywood carrying ‘the artist’s load, a great, shapeless chunk of experience’.
But although he had found American society unexpectedly charming, not all of American society had been charmed by him. Among the Waughs’ hosts in New York had been two of Evelyn’s former American agents with whom he had quarrelled in the 1930s, Carl Brandt and his wife Carol, formerly Carol Hill. Carol, whom Evelyn privately deemed ‘a woman of no intellectual interests … a secretary raised to its highest power’,76 later told Peters that she had found Evelyn ‘delightful, gracious and appreciative in every sense of the word. But I must say we seem to be alone in this land of sunshine.’ She was by then MGM’s New York story editor and accompanied the Waughs to Los Angeles, so knew all about Evelyn’s dealings there: ‘I truly think that people here have tried to be friendly and gracious,’ she wrote, ‘both in terms of the usual dinners and in terms of work, but Evelyn has been so constantly arrogant and rude apparently as to have left a trail of bloody but unbowed heads behind him. Some of this, I gather, has been utter mischief on his part and some of it has been complete misunderstanding of his particular variety of humor and wit.’77
Among those immune to Evelyn’s charms was Billy Wilder’s screenwriting partner Charles Brackett, who met him at a party held in his honour by the director George Cukor (later, incidentally, buried at Forest Lawn). Amid a gathering that included Greta Garbo and Olivia de Havilland, it was perhaps hardly surprising that Brackett found the Waughs ‘very unprepossessing’ by comparison, describing them as ‘a bank clerk and his snuffly wife, an ill-favoured tailor’s dummy with halitosis and a blue-eyed Elsa Lanchester part’. Brackett returned later to Cukor’s to find that ‘in my absence Waugh had sent his wife home, dismissed her in a rude way which impressed everyone unpleasantly’.78
If not perhaps in that instance, Evelyn’s rudeness often began as a tease to help liven things up, or else it was a bracingly forthright statement of how he actually felt. But it was not always easy to tell which. Igor Stravinsky had lunch with Evelyn in New York in 1949 and remarked afterwards: ‘Whether Mr Waugh was disagreeable, or only preposterously arch, I cannot say.’ When Stravinsky attempted found some common ground by talking about his own recent sung Mass, Evelyn replied: ‘All music is positively painful to me.’79 Which happened to be true.
Much of Evelyn’s humour clearly did get lost in translation, however even the English colony sometimes failed to appreciate his jokes, David Niven for instance taking strong exception to having his black housekeeper referred to in her presence as ‘your native bearer’.80 Evelyn knew perfectly well that he was rarely at his best with strangers of any nationality, and of how offensive he could be, even to his own wife. When Gilbert Pinfold asks ‘Why does everyone except me find it so easy to be nice?’,81 Evelyn was clearly speaking about himself. In Italy Harold Acton recalled his spectacular rudeness in restaurants and his sublime remark to the director of the British Institute, Francis Toye, who had a way of standing too close: ‘If you want to kiss me please get it over quickly.’ Invited to a tea party as guest of honour, Evelyn spent the entire time handing round the tea and cakes, explaining to his hostess, ‘I’d much rather do this than have to talk’. When Baby Jungman told him how much a cousin of hers had enjoyed Brideshead, Evelyn thought it best to warn her: ‘I am sure you will have fully explained to him how disappointing I am to meet. Writers should be heard and not seen … Writers should stay in their burrows. I intend to anyway until the ferrets come for me.’82
* * *
When they arrived back in England shortly before Easter, Laura headed straight down to Pixton and the children, while Evelyn, evidently less eager for this family reunion, spent five days in London then went with Simon Elwes to Downside for a four-day retreat before eventually joining Laura, Teresa and Bron at Piers Court on Easter Day. Two weeks later Evelyn recorded: ‘Laura is busy and happy with agriculture and has lost all her Californian chic.’83 Shortly afterwards he went to Ireland, where he had been toying with the idea of buying a castle to escape the socialist regime and his boredom with Gloucestershire social life. ‘If only country neighbours would talk like Jane Austen characters about gossip & hobbies,’ he wrote to Nancy. ‘Instead they all want to know about Molotov & de Gaulle … I am anxious to emigrate, Laura to remain & face the century of the common man. She is younger, braver & less imaginative than I. If only they would start blowing the place up with their atoms.’84 By mid-May he was back again at his writing desk at Piers Court.
The first thing he wrote about his Hollywood experiences was ‘an article on Death for Life,’85 as he described it, 2,500 words on Forest Lawn and its founder Dr Eaton, ‘the first man to offer eternal salvation at an inclusive charge as part of his undertaking service’, as Evelyn put it.86 On 21 May he began work on The Loved One and by early September he was able to send a first draft to Peters asking his advice on ‘what form it should take in its public appearances in USA and England’.87
Uncharacteristically po-faced in this instance, Peters replied that ‘being perfectly frank’ the question was rather ‘whether it should make any public appearance at all’. ‘I found parts of it very amusing, of course; but parts were to me revolting, and my over-riding conviction when I had finished the story was that it was not worthy of Evelyn Waugh … It seems to be one of those ideas that is extremely amusing in conception [but] it is not possible to be funny about corpses for 25,000 words. The humour begins to putrefy and finally leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.’88
Evelyn valued his agent more as a negotiator than as a critic and tactfully suggested that ‘the tale should not be read as a satire on morticians but as a study of the Anglo-American cultural impasse with the mortuary as a jolly setting’.89 Still convinced that The Loved One was a work of art, Evelyn approached Cyril Connolly – with whom he had made up after having him and ‘his concubine’90 Lys Lubbock to stay in June – asking if he would be prepared to publish it in its entirety in Horizon. Connolly replied: ‘Est, est, est! as the bishop said! One of your very best I think. I should be honoured …’91
The Loved One duly made its first appearance in Horizons February 1948 issue, with a preface by Connolly commending it as ‘a Swiftian satire [which] in its attitude to death, and to death’s stand-in, failure … exposes a materialistic society at its weakest spot’. It was, he suggested, ‘one of the most perfect short novels of the last ten years and the most complete of [Waugh’s] creations, a story cast in a kind of light but immensely strong aluminium alloy, like the one-piece chassis of a racing car’.92
The magazine sold out overnight but there was then an eight-month interval before the hardback, due to the fact that Scott-King’s Modern Europe had sold 14,000 copies in the run-up to Christmas and was still doing well. Evelyn was keen to publish The Loved One in America to capitalise on his popularity there after Brideshead, however publishers on both sides of the Atlantic were concerned that Whispering Glades in the novel was too easily recognisable as Forest Lawn Memorial Park and that Dr Eaton might sue for libel.
To allay such fears Evelyn asked his high-spirited friend Lord Stanley of Alderley to add a codicil to his will stipulating that on his death he wished his body to be transported to Los Angeles for burial at Forest Lawn, as he understood that ‘this cemetery bore some resemblance to the beautiful one so movingly described by his friend Mr Evelyn Waugh’.93 Ed Stanley’s letter to his solicitor requesting this, presumably written on House of Lords notepaper, was enough to set publishers’ minds at rest and the book appeared in Britain and America in November to generally favourable reviews, although Evelyn’s old adversary Edmund Wilson spitefully maintained that the ‘patrons and proprietors of Whispering Glades seem more sensible and less absurd than the priest-guided Evelyn Waugh’.94
The Loved One was dedicated to Nancy Mitford, who received her advance copy in Paris where she had moved in 1946 in pursuit of her elusive Free French colonel, Gaston Palewski, the great love of her life. ‘Do try & laugh a little,’ wrote Evelyn. ‘It is dedicated to you as the hardest hearted well no toughest is the word girl I know.’ Nancy replied: ‘The heaven of The Loved One oh you are kind to dedicate it to me, thank you thank you for it. I’ve been utterly shrieking over it since it arrived, luckily was lunching alone. I must say I couldn’t quite do it and the foie de veau together … but combined it happily with a banana & am now in despair at having finished it … Dined with a young American last night & told him your book was to be called The Loved One. “What a beautiful name,” he said. Poor him.’95
Evelyn greatly missed being able to trade gossip with her at Heywood Hill’s bookshop, however if anything they got along even better by letter, their jokes often based upon a shared readiness to be mischievous and cruel about others, unlike Cyril Connolly, the occasional butt of their unkindness, who told Evelyn that he did not regard the suffering of his fellow men as a fit subject of humour. As far as Nancy was concerned, Evelyn was not just a highly entertaining friend and faithful confidant but also a much-valued literary sounding board whose talents as a wordsmith and prose stylist she conceded were on an altogether different plain – ‘your well known knack of one tap on the nail & in it goes, whereas the rest of us hammer & pound for hours’ – yet whose advice on matters such as romance and religion she felt free to disregard.
It was he who had suggested the title of The Pursuit of Love, her first bestseller, in 1945, and that Uncle Matthew’s home Alconleigh should be dominated by ‘stark and real’ images of death, however as often as not his suggestions went unheeded. ‘I long to read your novel & criticize tho what’s the good you never take my advice,’96 Evelyn wrote to her in 1950 when she was at work on The Blessing. He nevertheless remained the writer whom Nancy measured herself against most often in her own mind and
whose approval she most craved. At the same time her headstrong determination to stick to her guns served to preserve his great fondness and regard for her.
Several others benefited from Evelyn’s generosity with literary advice, among them the Scottish writer Moray McLaren, whom Evelyn helped rescue from alcoholic despair and loss of faith, just as he did with his old Oxford friend Alfred Duggan, whose late-flowering career as a bestselling historical novelist owed a huge debt to Evelyn’s help and encouragement.* Another whom Evelyn mentored was the Thomas Merton, the talkative Trappist monk from Kentucky whose autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain Evelyn edited and cut by a third for its English edition, Elected Silence. ‘Americans tend to be very long-winded in conversation,’ Evelyn explained to the monk, ‘and your method is conversational’; he added: ‘it is of course much more laborious to write briefly’.
Evelyn first visited Father Merton at his monastery when he went to America for a second time, in November 1948, the result of a shrewdly aimed proposal that he write about the Catholic Church in America for Life. The magazine’s proprietor, Henry Luce, greeted his idea enthusiastically, not least since his wife, the writer Clare Boothe Luce, was an ardent convert like Evelyn who developed a soft spot for her despite initially thinking her rather self-centred. He would go weak at the knees whenever they subsequently met, and when she came over to London the next year he gave a dinner party at Tom Burns’s to introduce her to a selection of distinguished British Catholics. As Lady Pamela Berry observed to Nancy Mitford, Clare regarded Evelyn ‘in a quaint Catholic light as a noble gentle person who is capable, oh yes, from time to time of spitefulness, but who is on the whole a saintly, good person healed and beatified by the Church. What do you know about that?’97